


A Lie, Yes.

by nightmaremagnet



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Insanity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:00:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22688884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightmaremagnet/pseuds/nightmaremagnet
Summary: After the failure of the Great Twisting, the Distortion is left to figure out what it means to be Michael Shelley.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 53
Collections: The Magnus Archives Rare Pairs 2020





	A Lie, Yes.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [olio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/olio/gifts).



Michael’s door does not want to open and its feet do not want to walk through it.

Michael pushes and the world bends around its strength. Oil and water. The harder it shoves the deeper the door bows; a graceful curtsy, a steep bell curve, grading its performance.

North to north, south to south.

It pushes and pushes.

A treadmill.

A carrot and a stick.

The edge of the horizon.

Ever closer, never there.

When is a door not a door?

The lid of the jar unscrews and Michael steps forward when the door creaks open.

Michael frowns and doesn’t frown. It understand and forgets, the unknowable sliding as facts into its mind and washing away like the tide.

It steps out of the spiral and into something a little more slimming.

The room Michael walks into is a magic eye portrait, a picture within a picture.

Two rooms superimposed over each other.

Parallel universes visually overlapping.

One simple and easy. A happy, happy joy, joy care free home away from home. A found family. A purpose.

The other, though… oh, the _other_ is heavy with the weight of common knowledge classified intel. A panopticon prison, every cell monitored for maximum surveillance.

Michael is standing in The Magnus Institute.

It tries to let its eyes relax, to see past the trickery and find which of the rooms is the doppelgänger.

But each are real.

And neither are genuine.

Two rooms for the price of one, comes free with one diluted Spiral and one limited edition Michael Shelley.

Michael looks backwards, inching towards its hallways, just visible beyond the yellow doorway.

Home sweet home.

But no sooner does Michael regret taking a stroll outside than the door slams shut on its face.

Michael jumps, startled by the swing slam bang bam it feels resonating through every inch of its endless awareness.

An exaggerated response to something scarcely traumatic, but…

Oh, well.

Michael turns back to The Magnus Institute. A strange den of reason and rationale that complicates its senses and obscures what it knows to be true and untrue. That clashes, smashing sledgehammer facts into its perfectly wrought fiction.

Michael grabs its head as though there is a brain inside it to shake back into rights. Like it is a human with a human biology. It stumbles because its legs are not legs and it has forgotten how to move in such a spongy plastic titanium structure.

It tries to catch itself with a step forward and almost falls until last minute instinct reminds it that the physical is insubstantial and travel is a standstill.

It is much more graceful after that.

Michael reaches out with its six, eight, twelve senses, hunting down a consolation prize, for one _must_ be here.

The Archivist is never far from her domain.

But it can find nothing, nothing but what is in front of it.

A desk with a man behind it, writing on discount stationary that Michael recognizes on sight.

There is a plaque on the desk:

_ Elias Bouchard _  
_ Head of the Magnus Institute_

Tagged like a zoo animal. Species and Habitat.

Properly catalogued within the Archives and put in his little office cage.

Memories are unreliable things. Static and greyscale. Here and not here. Then and not then. Lacking sustenance and impossible to devour. Michael’s breath catches at the wash of them, scouring, combing – metal grating brush lines, separating and parting, dividing the strands of it.

Untangling.

Michael remembers because it occurs to it that there is a past and it is valid. It remembers being younger, smaller, glued together with muscle and sinew, sitting across from that nameplate and mispronouncing ‘Bouchard.’

Elias was kind. He forgave Michael Shelley with a smile and _‘you will make a fine addition to our little family, Mr. Shelley. Welcome aboard.’_

And then the strands fall back like shuffled cards, smooth but scrambled.

Michael is mispronouncing ‘Elias’ now, drawing the word out into waving clumsy syllables.

“I-Lie-Yes,” it sings, a melancholy somber pitch. It laughs. “Yes,” it says, “Yes, I do. You do. We do.”

Elias doesn’t reply, writing his numbers and names and spreadsheet _facts_. Pretending he doesn’t notice a spiral in his den of sharp square lines.

Michael laughs. It laughs and laughs because the part of _it_ that is _he_ doesn’t realize Spirals don’t fit well into corners and that Elias is not benign.

“Elias,” it says. Dull and bland Elias, sitting in the epicenter of Gertrude’s righteous lair.

Her liar’s lair.

“Elias,” it is difficult to focus on him. Michael’s eyes blur and dilate. Elias is so grounded, existing in a foreign reality with an axis that tilts Michael’s understanding.

“ _Elias!_ ” It slams its hands down on the desk, desperate and needy and choked full of rage.

Elias doesn’t startle. He doesn’t jump or shout. He pauses his writing and Michael thinks it really, really might just rip the director to shreds.

Who could stop it? Gertrude isn’t here to save her handler.

Elias sighs. He puts the cap on his pen – everything has a place in Elias’ little bubble of a world, a pristine known place – and steeples his fingers together as he looks up, meeting Michael’s eyes. “Is there something I can help you with?” he asks.

Michael startles, cringing backwards, looking into Elias’ reel-to-reel eyes; two blank tapes. It can hear the background whirling of the magnetic recording. The scritch scratch scrawl of charcoals and quills and pens.

It remembers joking in the breakroom about Elias’ dull corporate eyes. How utterly _boring_ he was, to be the head of such an interesting place.

Michael remembers twelve hours cramming information for Gertrude. Trying so, so hard to find supplementals she’d moved and misplaced, and Elias – frustrating Elias, ineffectual Elias, who couldn’t possibly comprehend the enormity of Gertrude’s work and never made any effort to try – forcing him out the door, demanding he rest. _‘I shall have to have words with Gertrude about this. I can’t have you running yourself ragged on her behalf.’_

And the Distortion laughs because it remembers that Elias is A Lie, Yes.

It curls its fingers on the desk and twists its wrist, shredding coiled grooves into the fine mahogany like delicate rice paper. It stares back into Elias’ depthless eyes that watch it with the blank depersonalized lens of a recorder; analyzing all of its bits and pieces, dissecting it with practiced ease and seeing straight down into the core of it.

“Of course,” Michael says, quietly. “I had… forgotten. _Beholder_.”

“That’s quite all right,” Elias says, uncapping his pen like he considers this pesky, pesky meeting with its pesky, pesky pest over and done. “No harm done.” Reducing Michael to a harmless insect creeping into his office, crawling over his desk. Harmless as a creepy-crawly. There isn’t enough Twisting left for it to become an infestation and pesty pestilences that don’t spread their infection lickety split are immunized.

Quarantined.

Unmade.

Unmade.

 _Remade_.

Michael closes its eyes against the madness, but it doesn’t matter because it no longer sees the world through physical means and Elias remains in scatterbrained focus.

“Liar,” it accuses, disparaging and complimentary.

“Hardly that, I think.” Elias says with the suffering air of a man who has better things to be doing, but is trapped in a conversation that is beneath him.

“ _Liar!_ ” Michael hisses, because it knows the crushing grief of being seconds away from the ultimate, glorious ascension before the stench of this forsaken place invaded its every particle existence and now _it_ _will not scrub off!_ “You did this!” It shrieks, full of rage. “ _You!_ ” Michael can feel teeth in its mouth, too many teeth, long and pointy. They dig into flesh that is not flesh, that squishes and molds like a sponge when they jab into it.

Teeth that stab through pieces of it that never were and so must be.

“Well,” Elias concedes, “I suppose I am Gertrude’s boss. I could have refused her leave of absence. But on whose authority do I tell the Archivist what to do?”

The complexities of Beholding’s ranking hierarchy are a moot point. Any consultation between Gertrude and Elias would not have included supporting the Great Twisting. Elias would never allow It Is Not What It Is supremacy over his Ceaseless Watcher.

“Gertrude is far from unreasonable,” Elias continues. “Could we co-exist, I’ve no doubt we would. I’m sorry, but this is the way it had to be.”

Michael hates him. It _hates_ him.

And Michael hates him ten thousands leagues deeper, digging digging digging down into the molten trenches of its immortal core when it remembers posh, sophisticated Elias in a lime green promotional ‘Magnus Institute’ t-shirt, and how he’d bullied Gertrude into wearing one as well. When it remembers Elias choking on laughter at all the interns who dressed as him for Halloween. When it remembers Elias at the company picnic, failing miserably at eating barbecue chicken until, with bright eyes, he admitted defeat, sauce staining his shirt and cuffs and tie.

And Michael had stifled his laughter because Gertrude had never laughed because Gertrude knew Elias was a cold, calculating monster beneath his boss-of-the-year façade. 

Michael remembers Elias wishing them a good trip off to Zemlya Sannikova and _‘bring me back a postcard, won’t you Michael?’_ and it growls.

Michael crosses the artificial distance between them, a length of space that exists only in Beholding’s realm of evidence and actualities.

It circles around the false priest who pretends a deferment to a woman easily displaced. When Elias tries to swivel his chair, to stop Michael from settling at his back, Michael reaches out one long, long, disproportionately stretching arm and catches the headrest, holding it steady. Keeping Elias in his place.

Elias doesn’t make a fuss about it and Michael doesn’t expect him to. It’s not in the Eye’s nature to take action. The Eye is only good at one thing.

Michael can feel eyes scampering over its body, _Elias’_ eyes coming at it from all corners; watching, watching, watchingwatchingwatching. “Did you watch? As we were unmade and torn across realms that never were and always are? Were you… _entertained?_ ”

“Yes,” Elias says.

“Yes,” Michael repeats, dully. It tastes the word in the air. It tastes like Beholding: truth and definitions.

It tastes baked dry. Paper and books leeching the moisture from the room and Michael feels parched, too. Hollowed out and dusty on the inside.

Elias’ strict steady posture spreads stiff as a board when Michael touches him, sliding its long uneven fingers into his hair. He radiates unease, sitting regally in his cushioned leather throne behind his mahogany dais.

Its nails are too long, but its joints are strong when they clench and Michael digs its fingers into Elias’ hair, yanking his head back.

Elias’ voice is strained at the difficult angle, but he defends his position. “Did you think I would tell you ‘no’? That I mourned the failure of your ascension?”

“Michael… did.”

“And if our Michael had been aware of the true outcome of Sannikov Land, would he not have agreed to go? We lied to spare him the anxiety, not because we believed he would desert us in our time of need.”

A difficult answer to find, quashed into the crooked alleyways and cul-de-sac knowledge the Distortion almost possesses.

Anger and betrayal of this strange death that better translates into the beginning of its life.

“Gertrude promised we would be proud of Michael, saving the world. And so we are. No one promised to grieve.”

Michael yanks harder, pulling with great force and Elias’ chair topples back, falling and falling and crashing and rolling.

Elias tries to drop with it but Michael’s grip turns to squishy steel.

Elias reaches up, grasping the hand in his hair that hauls him straight. He gasps, whines, hisses in pain as Michael twists him around to face it. It could pull up and up, feet off the ground and shake all the duplicity out of him like rotted stuffing.

Elias doesn’t make a scene, he doesn’t fight back, and he won’t; Michael knows this like he knows so many new things. Elias will watch. He will document. He will avoid becoming a character in Michael’s drama, desiring to be an unnecessary cameo that has little bearing to the plot.

No.

 _No_.

The lazy assumptions that got Michael remade and the Great Twisting eliminated.

There’s calculation in Elias’ eyes – The Watcher’s _Eyes_. He has a limit, it is only that Michael does not know where his indulgence ends.

Michael growls as Elias stares at it, involuntary tears of pain clumping his eyelashes together as he marvels, “There’s so much of him in you.”

Michael can see the intrigue bewitching Elias. Can see it bait and catch and snare him.

Michael smiles, its lips curving unnaturally wide in its mirth.

It wonders what would happen to the little Beholder if it left. If it hid in its distorted halls where no prying Eye can See how it would _itch_ at Elias that there exists a shiny new object in the world that he cannot observe. A deep aching scratch nag, nag, nagging in his periphery. Torturous until Michael chooses for it not to be so.

“Is that so? Tell me what you See, Beholder,” Michael asks as its hand twists and bends and turns solid as water. Its body is not made for form and Elias slips from its grip, combing his fingers through his hair, wincing when his fingers brush his scalp.

Michael watches instead as the command clicks hungrily in Elias. Watches his eyes as the filing drawers of his mind swing open and he flips through the folders, searching through the catalogues.

The Eye obeying the Distortion, latching onto the opportunity.

Michael feels the scratch, scratch, pluck of sterile, steady hands brushing thinly across its mind that is not a mind; its foyers and dens. Careful, like Michael’s mind is an ancient tome that will fall apart under a heavy hand.

Michael does not mind. Surface thoughts have no value outside risk assessment and a creature who knows only logic would never dare venture far into It Is Not What It Is.

Elias is not stupid enough to be brave.

And he can’t do it, anyways. Michael feels him straining to reach its hallways, failing to breach them, stretching thin and draining himself to read the Distortion’s past.

Elias’ frustration sings through the Spiral’s empty spaces and Michael’s all-compassing perception.

But there are other ways of being Beheld.

“Disassociation. The Distortion would not see me worth wasting time on. I’m no Archivist and I have little authority over her,” Elias complies. “But Michael Shelley… he would look to me for answers. He would be afraid and would seek reassurance. …But Michael Shelley would not be angry. He would forgive.”

“What… what would you tell Michael?”

“ _Michael?_ Hmm. I would tell him that enemies are made, not inherited. That it’s okay to become overwhelmed, but it’s dangerous for a Spiral to lash out in fear.”

Michael laughs and Elias winces unhappily at the sound that saturates his office. He sighs and shushes and Michael laughs and laughs.

Dancing sparks snap crackle pop when Elias raises his hand and lays it against the side of Michael’s face. Jolts of opposing magnetic forces buzz between them. Michael cringes back, unhappy with the terrible sensation.

Elias steps forward. “Don’t.”

It bares its teeth, snarling its opinion of the order and Elias cuts his thumb on the sharp edge when he slides his fingers over them.

It gasps because it is Michael Shelley, squeamish at the thought of blood. It closes its lips around the wound because it is the Spiral, tasting its enemies weakness.

Elias wrinkles his nose in distaste and pulls his hand away, holding it between them. Showing off his unblemished skin.

And it remembers. It does not conceive as Michael wants it to. Its comprehension of feeling is unfamiliar. It doesn’t know the sensation of mortal exhaustion, doesn’t understand what it means to be drained, but it knows… The Watcher is not wrong. There is a limit to the Distortion’s power, it is only that it has forgotten how to experience its own breaking point.

Michael frowns and shakes its head.

It’s still laughing. Why is it laughing? Its voice cracks and breaks. Shattered glass, smashing agitation, shards of frenzy falling at its feet which are not feet, that touch the ground despite the failure of gravity.

Overwhelmed, as the Beholder accused.

“Oh, Michael. No harm’s been done,” Elias says, with much double meaning in his irritating logic. “If you care for my suggestion,” he continues, lowering his voice to a soft, soothing tone, “I recommend you return to your corridors and relearn who you are. Who you want to be.”

“I do not want to be a _who!_ ” Michael screams at Elias, who only regards him calmly.

“No. I imagine you don’t. But I’m only human, Michael,” Elias says with a shrug, “I do not know how else to say.”

That is true and it is untrue. The secrets Michael knows are Falling Titan vast and lying to a liar ancient as it is, is impossible.

Comforting, even if Elias doesn’t care.

But, no. No, Elias doesn’t know. Of course he doesn’t. No. Non, nada, zilch, zero, of course not.

Michael doesn’t know either.

With all its energy and might, its awesome power thrown into its Great Twisting, a centuries build up shattered, torn and bulldozed down… the Distortion is weak and so is being indulged.

The Distortion looks like Michael Shelley, and so it’s given sympathy.

It looks to its door. “If I get lost?”

Elias laughs. “What a worry!” and moves away so as to not block Michael’s path.

Michael hesitates.

“Michael Shelley is welcome here,” Elias says. “He always was as he always wanted to be. Do you want to be here?”

Michael can feel violin chords trill a rhythm of yes, yes, yes inside it.

“Do you feel welcome here?”

The strings staccato out of tune, warble and snap with sharp twangs.

Its awareness sweeps through the room that is two rooms; past and present. Michael and Spiral.

It remembers sitting across from Elias, delighted and pleased, smiling with his eyes. _‘I would like to offer you a promotion, Michael. How would you like to be an Archival Assistant?’_ Elias’ benign voice. Hopeful. Reassuring. _‘You don’t have to decide now, take the weekend. Think on it.’_

Think on it, think on it, think on forks in the road, pro’s and con’s, the perks of contract upgrades.

Elias knew the answer before he asked the question.

Michael Shelley was not welcome here. He was imprisoned here, though he did not know it.

Elias is a lie, yes. Free range farming poor Michael Shelley. Raising him for slaughter.

Specimen cultivated, lab grown meat.

Is that what welcoming is?

Michael looks at its door.

It looks at Elias’ door.

They are the same.

Elias has his own maze, dug deep beneath his institute. It is only that Beholding’s hallways are a labyrinth, nothing more. A single unbranching path.

A stacked deck.

Charted, known, a premeditated predetermined path.

A map for Michael Shelley. X marks the spot. A mystery prize inside.

A lie yes, out lying a liar, outlining a liar.

Impossible.

It is as welcome here as Michael Shelley was in Zemlya Sannikova.

And yet…

“There is nowhere I am not welcome.”

It _wants_ to be as welcome here as Michael Shelley was in Zemlya Sannikova.

“What?”

Michael leans forward, his nose brushing Elias’ because Avatars are stubborn things, not easily cowed. “I will go where I will go,” Michael says, relishing the taste of its words, “There is nowhere I am not granted passage.” Michael waves its hand and its bright yellow door swings open. “You _see?_ Even here, even in Beholding’s hallowed halls, I open where I please.”

Elias scowls because Elias knows there are limits to the Eye’s peeping tom rubbernecking and none at all to the Spirals.

None at all, except what it does not want to.

Though kaleidoscope eyes do not always understand what they see, they drink in the impossible angles beyond Beholding’s scale.

“Perhaps,” Michael says, flittering around Elias, zig zagging its way to its door, “perhaps, you are projecting your advice?”

“How so?”

“Gertrude made an enemy of Michael. It is you who has inherited a foe.”

“I don’t want to fight you.”

Michael leans against its doorframe and clicks its tongue; tsk, tsk, tsk. “But that is for _me_ to decide, little eye. The ball is in _my_ court,” Michael says, curling around its threshold and slipping into its halls. It breathes in the curdled syrup scent of its delirious, delusional, disorientating domicile. It jolts through Michael like smelling salts, jumpstarting its consciousness. “ _I’ll_ be Seeing _you_.”


End file.
